AfterDawn: News

ICANN approves international alphabets for websites

ICANN, the private body in charge of overseeing the foundations of the Internet has voted in favor of allowing characters other than the Roman alphabet for websites, including traditional and simplified Chinese characters, Russian Cyrillic, Korean Hangul and Hebrew among 16 alphabets.

For the time being however, the changes will only be limited to domains run by national governments such as .us or .uk.



ICANN's vote came after six years of discussions into the matter. The group says that about 40 percent of all websites are controlled by national governments with the other 60 percent being "top level" domains such as .net, .com and .org.

"This is only the first step, but it is an incredibly big one and an historic move toward the internationalization of the Internet," said Rod Beckstrom, CEO of ICANN.

Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 1 Nov 2009 16:57

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• 4 comments

• DarkJello

  40% are run by governments? That seems absurd.

  1.11.2009 22:57 #1

• Amak

  Looks like someone moved the decimal too far to the right.

  1.11.2009 23:32 #2

• gallagher

  Originally posted by DarkJello: 40% are run by governments? That seems absurd.It means 40% of the domains are registered to sites enging in .us, .uk, .ca, .tv, etc. These are all officially controlled by their respective countries. So if a site ends in .uk, then the UK has complete control over its regulation.

  2.11.2009 01:36 #3

• DarkJello

  That still seems really really high. So this is just domains, and not just the total amount of pages? Like Afterdawn would count as 1?

  2.11.2009 01:45 #4